


Bring Our Curses Home

by dimtraces



Series: Runaways 'verse [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: (he is trying. kinda.), Abuse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Darth Maul doesn't understand healthy relationships, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Road Trips, Sith Training, aftermath of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 18:40:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9561761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimtraces/pseuds/dimtraces
Summary: Out of every defeat, the means of the next victory can be fashioned. When Darth Maul gets abducted by a large zabrak that calls himBrother, he knows he is meant to train him, and it'll take the better part of a year until he'll realize that his new-found apprentice is just a fragile thing held together by regret and love and sinew. (The shock might even make him grow as a person.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Past emotional and physical child abuse--narrated by someone who doesn't think it's a bad thing--brainwashing essentially, dehumanization, current abuse, some strangling, dismemberment and a bit of indiscriminate murder.

_(When he was very very little—_ when was just a tiny bit smaller than he is today, Savage will later tease in his irritatingly affectionate way _—when he was just a young child, he believed that he was forged by darkness, and that in the lines on his face, evil secrets were written that everyone but him could read._

_It wasn’t pride that made him think this. Not exclusively, at least._

_It was childhood_ _naïveté, and bone-deep belief in his Master, and a few words taken too literally. It was people staring at his patterned face and scabby bruised arms when he sneaked outside. It was the Jedi he saw, who wanted to take him away for his bright yellow eyes, and it was the friendly smiles aimed at his Master. It was the people in the instructional holovids his Master left him, all hornless in shades of brown and pink—all human._

_It was holonet articles on family structures, and new words for concepts he had never even considered. Mother. Brother._

_A_ person _would have them, he’d believed._

_Maul had neither, and no need for them: He was a tool of the dark side, welded and marked and named after his function._

_It was a med-droid that dispelled the idea. Dirk, round and impatient and to be scrapped thirteen days later for programming bugs and lenience, had taken a routine test, and the word ‘zabrak’ flashed up on his screen. Maul looked it up, and touched his head in confusion—no hair. Then, he saw the section about Dathomir, the huts and the breeding and_ barbarous _, repeated again and again._

_He’d been so grateful that his Master had taken him away and trained him in the ways of the Sith, then. He will be their instrument of revenge._

_Despite his origins, Maul is destined for greatness.)_

+

Darth Maul wakes up, and at first, there is no reason to suspect that today begins the long confusing rest of his life. He is prone on some sort of soft, rumpled surface—not the usual way he sleeps, curled up and wrapping his head in his arms in some obsolete instinct for protection. Not actually an impossibility though, he thinks, especially when his eyes snap open, and his arms try to stretch. They don’t move. He didn’t lie down here. He is tied up on a bed in an unfamiliar cargo hold, a pounding emptiness in his mind and scabs itching on his skull.

_I’ve already mastered this test_ , Maul thinks.

He doesn’t voice his petulance—it is his Master’s prerogative to train him as He sees fit, and it does not matter that Maul already spent two months deprived of the force back when he was stationed in the facility on Mustafar. It doesn’t matter that Maul would have beaten the current galactic record of time spent immobile in a sensory deprivation tank by eighteen days if only he’d called the Thuris Book of Records. (He’s checked.)

He looks around and notices that there is someone else here with him, a hulking figure crouched in a corner and surrounded by the rustling of plastic containers. The being is almost certainly Maul’s attacker, though he hadn’t taken a good look at who entered his home before jumping into the fight. There was only the knowledge that this wasn’t Lord Sidious, and no-one but his Master would know of the room. That, and the memory of countless assassin droids randomly activating themselves at night.

Not looking properly was a mistake unworthy of any fighter, let alone a Sith apprentice, and now, he is paying for it.

Judging by their back, the attacker isn’t someone Maul recognizes. Not his Master’s usual muscle, not one of the mercenaries He still keeps around even though there is no need for them anymore, now that Lord Sidious has Maul.

The other person’s head is yellow-black, and bald, and _horned_.

“Brother,” the zabrak says when he turns around.

Maul had braced himself for trickery and pain the moment he became conscious of his failure. And yet, the word drives its teeth into the still-soft flesh of his belly. _Brother_ , so unfamiliar and sharp and wonderful.

_Brother._

“You are the brother I’ve been searching for. Brother, I have found you. I’ll bring you back home to Dathomir. Mother Talzin is waiting for you,” the kidnap— _his_ _brother_ tells him, but Maul doesn’t listen very closely. There is so much to think about.

_Brother,_ his hearts beat. _Brother, brother._

This is his kin. Flesh of his flesh. Maul did not come from nothing, after all.

This is… He flinches. This is a _trick_. A test of loyalty. Maul has given his Master everything, and yet, He thinks he’ll trade his station for the first flea-bitten savage that crosses his path. He thinks Maul might leave his apprenticeship behind, the grand plans of the Sith. The life of dedication. Everything. _For this?!_

The lying zabrak walks closer, and then he kneels before Maul—he is so big that he has to, that bending doesn’t suffice for reaching Maul even though the bed isn’t particularly low—and his eyes are on the ropes. He’s within striking range, unconcerned, as if Maul doesn’t pose a danger at all just because he’s tied up.

The disregard burns, but the betrayal— _did he really believe this man is his brother_ —the betrayal hurts more, and the knowledge he never should have cared in the first place.

Livid and quicker than a whip-snake, Maul bites down on the index finger of his Master’s new tool. There’s a crack and then another—Maul’s teeth weren’t made for this much pressure—and the attacker gives a satisfying cry of pain. _Let Him never underestimate me again_ , Maul thinks as his mouth floods with the familiar copper taste of blood.

He spits the meat and tooth-splinter back out, narrowly missing the other zabrak, who is scrambling backwards until he hits the wall. _This_ weakling _is the man Master sent to test Maul?_

“No! Wait, brother,” the kidnapper whimpers. Then, with slightly more strength: “Do you remember who you are, where you came from?”

“I am apprentice to the most powerful being in the galaxy,” Maul hisses.

“Sorry.”

_(Later, he’ll realize: If this had been a test, he would be dead now. He’d deserve it. With those eleven prideful words, he risked betraying his Master’s plan and the premature reveal of the Sith, and the end of everything he’s ever held dear.)_

Maul is tired of this charade. “Unhand me now,” he orders.

“I’m sorry, brother. The Mother wants to talk to you,” the impostor repeats, as if he thinks that Maul is a simple beast who hasn’t yet seen through his Master’s test. (As if Maul even _had_ a mother who cares.)

Detecting the plot will evidently not be enough for his Master. He’s probably instructed the zabrak to play along until his very end. Maybe He’s even made him believe the lie—Lord Sidious can spin magic with words that Maul hasn’t yet learned to understand, let alone perform himself.

No, his Master wants Maul to fight.

The force-suppressant is wrought strong, though, and with all his concentration he cannot find a way to slip out, neither with the dark side nor by dislocating any fingers to slip the knot at the wrists. It is much more powerful than the collar he wore for months on Mustafar.

He looks up again and catches the zabrak watching him. The pretend brother wears a joyful grin, but that means nothing: His Master has always had the kindliest smiles. Let him gloat, then. Let him bask in his victory over Maul, and let the pain come. Someday soon the kidnapper will make a mistake, and Maul will bring Lord Sidious his head.

After a few minutes, the messaging console starts beeping, and Maul flinches. _Does his Master expect a report of Maul’s victory already?_

The kidnapper doesn’t take the call and seal Maul’s fate, though.

He just freezes. He stares at Maul’s face as if he is seeing someone else entirely, someone dead. Then, he types something on the navcomputer’s keypad—coordinates, Maul suspects. _But where to?_ Unless he’s been unconscious for long enough that they might have already left Coruscant, which admittedly is a possibility with the ghost of vomit in his mouth and the way his head throbs, his Master is already _here_.

The console beeps again, insistent, and with one last look at Maul and no grimace of pain on his face, the yellow zabrak drives his massive fist through the transparisteel and metal as easily as if he was crushing an enemy’s head.

“Stay here, Maul,” he says. “Don’t worry. I won’t let you die like—She will never ever take you from me.”

Dimly, Maul begins to consider the possibility that sending _this man_ for his kidnapping wasn’t a plan.

It was a miscalculation.

+

The ropes are still wrapped around his arms a month later, and his Master is not coming for him.

+

_(Maul had spent his life alone, punctured by brief visits from his Master and long stretches of time in which movement—the dance of a fight to the death, or the rigorous sequence of training—had obliterated the need for conscious thought. There had been stillness as well, though, and an unmoving body breeds precipitance of mind._

_He’d considered many things in those idle moments, and occasionally, his thoughts had extended to that nebulous time_ after _._

_After victory._

_After his Master._

_He’d braved those vertiginous thoughts sometimes, with a small measure of excitement. How it would come to pass he’d ascend the hierarchy, he hadn’t considered—_ his Master is eternal and strong and thinking of His death feels like blasphemy— _but the power that he believed he was being groomed for called out._

_One day, it would be his turn to carry on the sacred traditions of the Sith. He’d be the keeper of their knowledge, of the strength that arises from pain and despair and hatred. The day would come when the qotsisajak would leave his mouth and enter the ear of his chosen successor, who will in turn hand it down and say once more,_ Peace is a lie. There is only passion.

_A master without an apprentice is nothing._

Choosing _that apprentice would take careful planning._

_He wouldn’t take a child, he’d decided. He wouldn’t have the patience for all that crying, for the feeble whimpering hunger as baby fat melts into bones and muscle. He’d get angry at the way stubbly red fingers waste his time when they grab for his hand every time he comes by, desperate for any touch—tiny hands flinching from the sizzling charcoal smell of the blade, and then reaching out again. It would take years until they stop flinching, he’d remembered. It would take even longer until they stop reaching out._

_He could always shut the child away, he’d known, but would he remember to drop off ration bars and beverages? He’d probably come back to a shrivelled corpse and feel glad to be rid of it. Its death would be unearned mercy. And before that, he’d know it’s there, weak and losing water-weight by the hour._

_No, a child apprentice wouldn’t do—)_

But then, another option drops into his life, wrapping his oversized yellow arms around Maul’s neck and refusing to let go.

It was not Maul’s plan, to take an apprentice now.

He still has much to learn, manipulations and enticements and everything his Master prefers to use—but an opportunity like this, an apprentice like this, will never come to him again. If he will ever attempt to eclipse his Master… If he will ever rise up and slay Him and prove to Lord Sidious that He was wise in selecting Maul as his successor, of all the wretched children of Dathomir, it has to be now, when his own chosen apprentice is still alive.

It is not a slight that Lord Sidious has not been searching for Maul, he realizes. It is a new kind of order: _Be hungry, apprentice Mine, and devour Me._

If he contacts Him, Maul will fail his Master, and Savage will die. His thoughts skitter over the shape of what Sidious has in store for men who dare take His possessions. He doesn’t think deeply of the wrath, or of his brother’s face caught in the rictus of agony. (It allows him to believe that his justifications are dispassionate, and that his foremost loyalty is still to the Sith order.)

+

“Brother, guess what I found,” Savage shouts into the Sheathipede’s belly, where Maul has spent his afternoon working on fine-tuning the motivator. The ship was so woefully maintained when he commandeered it two weeks ago that even the week-long overhaul was only able to achieve so much. Whoever could have thought it was a good idea to give a shuttle of his own to Maul’s unwieldy brother— _brother! The word is still new in the grooves of his mind._ Yes, the shuttle is flying smoothly already, but Maul has standards.

Savage would only have been in the way, so after their frustrating training session this morning, he’d been sent away to go have fun or whatever it is he does when Maul’s not watching.

_(It’s not that Savage was completely bereft of promise as an apprentice. He could clearly fight, at least, even though his kicks and punches were much less fluid than Maul would have liked, and he was unfamiliar with the most elementary of katas. He did know how to use the staff Maul had him whittle from one the scarce skeletal trees—the saberstaff, alas, still lies somewhere in the LiMerge building, and Maul will have to gather materials soon._

_There was possibility in Savage, up until the point Maul tried to goad him into an imprudent attack by leaving his left side open slightly. Not such an amateur move that someone with Savage’s skill should have seen the trap, but still an obvious exploitable ‘mistake’._

_His apprentice hadn’t attacked, though._

_The staff had clattered from his hands, decimeters away from impact with Maul’s skull. His eyes had grown glassy and the air had howled out of his mouth for minutes._

_When poking him with his own staff hadn’t produced any results, Maul had guided him to sit on the floor, and just watched for a while until intelligence slowly returned to Savage’s eyes. Eventually, he’d let him walk the twenty kilometres to Meirm City to calm down his emotions. Training is supposed to produce passion, and Maul would have known how to use the icy fear he’d sensed in his brother. But Savage is still a beginner in the dark arts of the Sith.)_

Now Savage is back, and he’s holding out a rusty device for Maul’s inspection. It’s a portable gas cooker.

Maul raises an eyebrow, unwilling to be infected by Savage’s obvious pride.

“I had to search for a while,” Savage says, “because no self-respecting weequay would ruin their food by boiling it. They’ve got taste buds, you know. But I found something to stop you complaining about my cooking every single day!”

It’s not a function of apprentices Maul that has ever had cause to consider before, but maybe he can grow to appreciate it. Savage certainly seems to think it matters. He spends hours preparing food every day, and then he pesters Maul with questions about preferences he has never before had the luxury of noticing. Getting meat prepared to his specifications instead of the uncooked spicy trash Savage forced down his throat for two months _is_ nice.

And next time, he’ll get Savage to bring back Maul’s favorite flavour of protein bar.

+

They sleep in the same room, now.

At first, they didn’t—well, actually, in the beginning they spent every second together, Maul cuffed and glowering on the bed and Savage refusing to let him out of sight, creaking and groaning away the nights on a chair just out of reach. Maul had taken what meagre satisfaction there was to be had, in those months of failure, from the knowledge that the unwanted chivalry gave his captor a constant sleep-deprivation headache, and a crick in the neck that just wouldn’t go away.

Maul didn’t sleep well either, on the bed. Too soft. Too unfamiliar. It was still worth it.

_(In an even earlier beginning, they’d shared. Savage had owned an adult bed, much too big for two children—let alone seven-year-old Savage on his own. When he’d been handed a new colicky baby, he’d quickly figured out that this way, he didn’t have to get out from under the blankets to comfort his little brother.)_

When Maul asserted control over the shuttle and their relationship, he made Savage leave every night. It was a simple decision: He has never shared space with another being. Neither has his old Master, he is quite sure. It is the nature of the Sith. They are alone— _“Hello,” Maul had said to a lizard once, then watched it be electrocuted and learned a valuable lesson—_ and they don’t trust anyone, least of all their apprentice.

It wasn’t pity that made Maul allow him back inside, thirty-four nights later.

It was not his problem that the Sheathipede only has two heated rooms, the small cockpit and the cargo hold with its assortment of space heaters. It wasn’t his problem that Savage has put dents in the cockpit ceiling with his horns—that he barely fits into the pilot seat, and certainly couldn’t sleep well there, judging by the way he tended to wander around at night. He’s a big, lumbering thing. He may have tried, but still his feet pounded the durasteel floor, and so Maul woke for the first, second and fifth time every night to a worried brother bent over the floor in the cargo hold’s corner that Maul had claimed as his bed.

It wasn’t any of those things, in the end.

It was the _yawning_.

_(They’d been stopping on a fleck in Hutt space called Tatooine. The suns had shone brightly through the cockpit’s transparisteel side, and Maul had been imagining himself as a Sith Lord triumphant, as one does in an idle moment. He’d been fighting the Grand Master of the Jedi in in a duel that drove both of them to the limits of their endurance. Maul had had the edge, though. Soon, he would have cut him down—in his mind, he is always_ slightly _better._

_He’d seen himself, ‘saber raised for the penultimate strike. His mind had fleshed out the scene and added Maul’s apprentice, mouth open in the semi-permanent gape of sleep deprivation._

_And then, he’d given up.)_

So they sleep in the same room now, and it’s annoyance, not shock, that makes Maul pry a pillow out of the walls of his nest and aim it at the whimpering heap on the bed. “No, brother,” Savage is moaning, over and over and over. “Brother, no, I won’t kill you, brother, no, no—”

Maul’s pillow hits true.

It impales itself on one of Savage’s horns, but he’s barely distracted from fighting his unknown enemy. His eyes are blank.

“Kill me, apprentice? You’re welcome to try,” Maul adds, in a loud and deliberate voice.

Savage’s head shoots up, as if he had just noticed Maul’s existence, and then he keeps staring. He raises his hands—chewed on, again, Maul notices. He wonders how Savage could have escaped into the world so clearly unfinished. This is the kind of action that’s trained out of children very young. _(He doesn’t even remember the biting, just the bitter poison coating his fingertips and the vomit that followed.)_

He keeps his body taut and immobile for a while and waits, his eyes trained on Savage’s—they reflect the scarce light back at him, and then it rebounds from Maul’s irises in turn, he imagines, like in that ball game he wasn’t supposed to watch. A hall of mirrors of red-yellow fibrovascular tissue and water. A pair of eyes, so identical to Maul’s own and yet so scared. Weak.

Savage doesn’t move either, apart from his heaving chest, and Maul doesn’t think about how his staring isn’t really a display of dominance, not anymore. It’s an anchor.

Slowly, his brother’s heartbeats wither into a dull pitter-patter, and Savage closes his eyes again.

_This is why this strange man searches out my company,_ Maul thinks. _This is what comforts my brother._ Maul is superior to him—apart from that one embarrassing first meeting—superior in every way, and Savage could never hope to fight back. This apprentice will never surpass the master. This brother will never cut his own flesh.

Quickly, Maul discards the thought again. It doesn’t make any sense: Nobody would trust the one best placed to hurt them, his Master has told him.

And as in all things, He is right.

+

One night, he catches Savage putting a small bowl filled with some kind of waterfowl meat into the cupboard.

_(They have always been there, these bowls. Maul disposes of them each morning, quickly heating them and gulping them down. They contain barely one bite’s worth of food. His brother is evidently a wasteful eater, always putting good things out of sight and leaving them to spoil. He should really make Savage wash the bowls himself and stop covering for his brother’s disgusting untidiness._

_The first one, he’d smelled when he was still shackled, something sweetly rotten from far overhead.)_

“What are you doing?” Maul asks flatly. Now, he realizes that it doesn’t look like slowness of mind: This is intentional.

Savage smiles at him. “A mournful offering,” he says, an odd cadence in his voice. “An _improvised_ offering. We usually leave them out some miles off the village, protected from vermin by wooden trellises. As the body in the ground rots, so does the meat, and our feelings with it.”

“How wasteful,” Maul says. What’s dead is dead, and food is food. There is no point in giving a useless weak corpse anything more than it deserves. He is glad that he’s been eating them.

“You are _supposed_ to go hungry after a death,” Savage explains slowly, as if to a small child. “Your thoughts will… It—helps. When the offering is gone, so is our pain. It doesn’t work as well, apparently, out here in space. Everything is too sterile.” He swallows. “Here, you’re hungry. Eat. You can have it,” Savage says, and he holds out the bowl toward Maul.

“Raw meat is inedible,” Maul protests, even though he was going to eat it five minutes ago. Then he peers inside and hisses, “And there is _blood_ in this.”

“Of course. It’s a red-hand mourning.”

The words mean nothing to him, and most likely not to anyone else in the— _civilized_ —world, either, something Savage tends to forget. He is an odd man, often speaking in paraphasias and then looking heartbroken when Maul doesn’t respond. It’s sad. However, mental weakness is not to be indulged— _Maul babbled sometimes, as the holonet would later tell him young children are wont to do, and so Master held lightning against his face until he was still_ —and Maul only stares at him.

Savage looks away. “It’s my blood,” he says. “It means murder. I killed him.”

“You _killed_ someone?” Maul is reluctantly surprised. Despite his early promise, Savage has never shown any great aptitude for fighting. Maul has always beaten him easily, even rusty as he was after two trainingless months. Savage never puts up a good fight when he wrestles him out of the good sun-bathing spots, or really defends himself at all. He just rolls over when Maul presses his hands against his throat, and lets his belly rumble with laughter.

Now, Maul tentatively revises his impression: Savage is _possibly_ not as weak as he looks. Maybe he’s just had an off day— _a lot_ of off days. Maybe it will be possible to forge something worthwhile out of his new apprentice yet.

“I did,” Savage replies, and then he sets the offering-bowl on the table and turns to walk out of the kitchen. “Oh brother have mercy, I did.”

+

_(A year later, Savage will bandage the torn stump of Maul’s leg, and he’ll whisper something, a hypnotic staccato rhythm. At first, it’ll appear to be a feeble attempt self-calming, as close to meditation as Savage has ever gotten, but then he’ll look up at Maul and explain, “This is an old cradle-song. I sang it for—”_

_Maul will chew through the last remaining dregs of his patience. “I don’t_ know _it,” he’ll snarl._

_Savage will attempt to defend himself. “I know, brother,” he’ll say. “I know. I wasn’t—I forget sometimes. We are together_ now _, and it’s right, it’s so… And then you look at me, all confused. And I remember. I remember a sadist bought my baby brother and it took me twenty years to get him back.”_

_Maul will be so uncomfortable he won’t complain again for months._

_Secretly, he’ll suspect that that was the reason why Savage shared his thoughts in the first place.)_

+

Savage uses his bare hands to crush the head of a trandoshan who aims his rifle at Maul.

The qualms about his suitability have long been forgotten by then—have been wilfully suppressed—and Maul doesn’t notice at all that it isn’t squeamishness that stops Savage, but something even more alien: This here is the only person in the world who has ever thought that Maul needs protection and care.

+

They’re in a decrepit hangar somewhere deep in the ecumenopolis of Nar Shaddaa, and Maul is thinking of home. It’s a moment of weakness. It’s just the rats skittering through the empty space. It’s the light of a distant sun filtering through a tiny window, almost blotted out by the ever-present smoke, calling to Maul, _Climb! Climb! Up there, you will see the sunrise._ It’s a corner filled with rags and scribbled-on flimsi and some kind of mechanical project. Everything’s covered in dust: The homeless owner must have left everything behind. Maybe they got dragged onto a cruiser, never to be seen again. Maybe they’re enjoying the adventure. Maybe their carcass is rotting in a cellar somewhere.

He shakes his head to dispel the thoughts.

There is a job to do.

He is here, today, because Savage dragged him along. He’d been excited, his brother, talking about his contacts. Talking about his _business_ , hauling goods and victual and contraband across the galaxy. Maul had tried to explain that they are Sith, that smuggling is below their dignity, but it hadn’t dimmed the light in Savage’s eyes and only fomented Savage’s protestations. Eventually, Maul had conceded to the more important goal of making him _shut up_ , even if it meant going along to pick up the cargo.

Savage’s contact is a human small-time robber, flanked by a dozen more members of his species armed with vibroshivs.

_Good,_ Maul thinks, taking in the way their eyes narrow disdainfully when the brothers walk in. _At least they’re armed._ If they hadn’t even assigned a minimal threat level to Savage after their past interactions, he would really need to have some firm words with his apprentice.

Maybe he’ll have them anyway, because when the human offers three hundred credits for two not-to-be opened crates to be brought to the inner rim planet Denon, Savage appears to want to shake his hand.

The human scum grins.

Maul reaches for Savage’s hand. He finds the index finger, the left one—the one Maul hasn’t yet bitten off—and now he bends it backwards until Savage cries out, and stops moving.

Then, he steps forward and says, “I am afraid that all transport fees have increased by twelve-hundred percent. It’s such a dangerous business nowadays. There are too many crews out there who would take the cargo for themselves and _slit their client’s throat_.” He pauses for effect and raises one eyebrow. “I’m sure you agree that finding an honest delivery service is worth the fee.”

In the resulting fight, he cuts through the gang with ease, and it’s been a long time since he has felt so happy.

+

_(“I_ understand _that there was no need for money on Dathomir,” Maul will reply when Savage complains later. “I understand that this is a new world for you...”_

I was protecting you _, he doesn’t say. He isn’t sure that it would be true, anyway._

_“We have to be on guard. They will assume that every zabrak is a stupid beast, and we will not confirm it. If you want to keep playing those_ games _, apprentice, you will comport yourself in a dignified way. No true Sith would allow themselves to be ripped off like that.”_

_He won’t admit that he doesn’t really know what exactly three hundred credits can buy, either. The offer had just seemed like a low sum, considering his former Master had always talked about billions whenever he’d mentioned money.)_

+

Two days later, Savage is swaddled on his bed with a broken-off side horn and most of Maul’s blankets, a pouch of surface ice he’d told Maul to scratch up held against his head. There is no more training today, because apparently, this is the kind of injury that, if it had struck Savage’s brother, would be cause for week-long observation and pampering.

“Let’s try again tomorrow,” he’d told Maul. “And come in every hour and wake me up. Can’t sleep. It could be a concussion,” like an oafish—

He is being uncharitable, Maul notices.

Yes, Savage is weak… but does Maul blame his beloved speederbike— _did_ , Maul corrects himself, it is gone now, still hidden on the LiMerge’s uppermost level unless some low-life has stolen it—did he blame it when the ignition didn’t start right, or the steering veered slightly to the left? No. He worked. He pared it down to its core mechanics when he couldn’t repair the fault otherwise, and didn’t pause to sleep or eat until it was _better_.

The fault lies within Maul alone. He has been indulging himself, every time he throws the staff at Savage and shows him a new style of parrying, a better evasive manoeuvre. Every time he takes a bite of Savage’s cooking.

Every time he shies away from sharing his Master’s training with his brother, he fails their lineage.

Every second he does not spend starving the light in Savage’s eyes, so that it has nothing left to consume but the weakness that still lives within his brother’s bones… and for what, the craven selfish fear that one day, Savage might not be happy to see him, anymore? The feeling of dry callused hands stroking the base of his horns at night? He’s been taught better than that.

He has fashioned Savage into an enjoyable sparring partner, a laughing man, a capable smuggler and bounty hunter—an _equal_. Not a Sith.

He has failed his brother.

+

Maul has grown used to the soft background hum of his brother’s emotions. It is just there, like a moderately annoying small-fly—always hovering around, seeking to bite Maul and infect him with its backwash. There is warmth, yes, there’s boiling rage and fear and coziness, and sometimes, when Maul is complaining about the quality of Savage’s food or when they come out of hyperspace a day early because Maul has reset the navcomputer and he’s laughing at Savage’s confusion, there’ll be the flash of a patterned orange face in the corner of his eye and the bitter alien taste of shame and sorrow in his mouth. Beneath it all, there is all-consuming love. Devotion, clinging to everything like tacky blood and just as impossible to scrub off.

Even now, when Maul has stormed into the room holding their beds, seconds after his revelation, and ordered Savage to get up and receive his first true lesson as a Sith apprentice, it is there.

Even now, in this elementary lesson of strangulation and near-death and terror— _a lesson he’d first received when he barely reached up to his Master’s hip_ —when Maul’s fingers ring his brothers neck and try to wring all the air out and the weakness with it, and awaken the glimmer of power that he is sure lives within Savage’s flesh. He is showing him to reach for the might of the dark side, which rears up out of agony and gives survival and unimaginable strength. Anger is an energy.

And even now, he feels his brother’s mind and the love in it, diluting the pain and the slow white slide of Savage’s terror and the euphoria that inevitably follows air-loss.

His presence is just _there_ , faithful and eternal—

Or so Maul had thought.

Savage’s eyes roll with the pressure, and the pulse under Maul’s hands stutters for the fraction of a second. In surprise, he lets go.

The swirling hum that is _Savage_ flickers, and then it rears up in a deafening miasma of another time, with hands that are not his and _I am your kin, do not do this_ and terrible pressure, and blood under Maul’s fingernails that isn’t there. The suffocating pain that follows isn’t Maul’s, but it is as powerful as any hate he has ever turned to, and he knows: This is it.

This is the moment when his apprentice becomes a true Sith.

And then, impossibly, the pain dies. Where the solid mental presence of his brother used to be, there is only an absence: a hole, the loss of a sense as profound as touch or sight. A sense of serenity, of acceptance.

Maul’s hands vibrate. There is no pulse under them that he can feel.

He feels its lack as if he was rent in two.

“Brother,” he whispers. “Brother.”

There is no answer.

It cannot be. Savage is not weak. His brother is _not_ this _weak_. There was potential, Maul has seen it! It was just going to take a little less coddling—he was just going to teach him with his Master’s lessons, also—he was just going to… Maul has been asphyxiated, and it made him _stronger_! It made him a Sith! It didn’t make him—

He’s still cradling his brother’s head, but his eyes are too dull now to look at it.

There is no movement: He does not notice the gasps, the desperate sucking-in of air.

There is only agony—implacable, indomitable, inexorable.

_There is no movement._

There is _more_ than he has ever felt. A swirling kaleidoscope fills him to the brim and bursts the durasteel walls of the shuttle. There is no space for air when he opens his heart, no space for anything anymore but fear—more fear than he could ever manage to feel for himself even in his youngest moments—and grim determination.

Until recently, Maul’s whole life had been at the disposal of his Master. No matter how much he loved his speeder bike, how often he polished it or the years he had spent refining his saberstaff, he had always known they weren’t really his. His body has always been an instrument wielded by another’s will.

He has never owned anything before.

He will _not_ relinquish his brother. Not to the dark side. Not to death. Not to anything. Not anymore.

But it is too late.

There is nothing left in Maul’s world but this knowledge, and his fingers, too heavy to feel, and the skull they hold.

They hold it, and it is still, and then it is squirming with a hacking cough that joins the rushing in Maul’s ears so easily that it might as well belong to a ghost. There is movement, and then his arms are being repositioned, like a shut-off droid’s, and he is pulled upwards, and then, eventually—

There is a gentle hand stroking his horns.

+

“I have failed you, brother. I am an unworthy master. I’m not like—I couldn’t—”

“Shhhh, Maul,” Savage whispers hoarsely, and he does not react to the horror Maul has become, kneeling on the bed and wracked with weakness and pouring hot salt from his eyes. He only takes his brother’s hand and clutches it closely against his chest, and he sings the cradle-song.

+

They’ve been on Bespin for a while now, and the ring of bruises around Savage’s throat—never truly visible through the black markings in the first place—has faded. They’re trying to meet up with a frankly inconsiderate client. It’s the kind of trip that was only supposed to last a single day, at the behest of a squirrely chadra-fan who’s too paranoid to send the data on their target via holonet.

Today, she showed up. She’s three weeks late, and she won’t even agree to Maul’s entirely reasonable demand that she triple the fee, as compensation for her tardiness.

Instead of the stalker she wants rid of, it’s her own head that’s bouncing across the dirty floor.

Maul still has his newly built saberstaff out when someone shouts at them, “Savage? Savage Opress!”

Twi’lek. Bartender. Female. Yellow and short, mid-forties probably, no dress sense that Maul can make out. Slight limp, bad hip. There is a Free Ryloth flag behind her, pinned to the wall behind the bar, and her bare shoulders are covered with the scars left behind by interrogation. Ten different ways to take her down, and three in which she might pose a danger despite her ailments. That’s what Maul registers, and then he realizes he remembers her. (Maul’s got a decent memory for faces, not that it has ever served his purposes. In his life, seeing someone again after years will only ever mean one thing: That he didn’t stab hard enough, the first time.)

A job for his old Master, less than a year before his life changed irrevocably. She was a bystander, a terrified victim hiding behind a bar counter. There’d been the stench of alcohol on her breath, and the distinct possibility she wouldn’t even remember his visage, and so he’d judged her unworthy of elimination.

“I was wonderin’ whether you’d show up again. And this is the beloved missing brother, I’m assumin’?” She grins conspiratorially at Maul, and she isn’t put off by his unimpressed glare, or the stench of lightsaber-charred meat that was in his robes for two days after their first meeting. That’s in his clothes _now_. The only good thing to come of this... situation is the confirmation that he was right: She _was_ too inebriated and oblivious to bother killing.

She isn’t drunk now, or maybe she just doesn’t smell like it.

No matter.

What’s important is the way she raises her arms and attempts to touch Savage.

Maul raises his ‘saber again. He barely restrains himself, even after realizing that Savage isn’t cowering or apprehensive. There is not even the new, instinctive flinch that has slowly grown smaller over the past few weeks. His brother is refusing the hug, offering a handshake instead, and that warning didn’t come from the force after all—no, it’s just Maul’s twin hearts beating with the suspicion that here is someone who wants his most precious possession for herself.

She only wants a loan, it turns out.

An evening in Savage’s company, sitting at the bar counter and drinking from foul-smelling bottles. They talk about this and that and Maul’s alleged snoring, and then someone called Feral, with decreasing levels of grammatical correctness.

Maul does not ask. He glowers all the approaching customers away, and the beings that approach him with beer coasters scrawled with unfamiliar number-code. It’s not that he wouldn’t prefer taking a new mission right now, after the current one ended with a disappointing lack of fighting. He just needs to prevent his apprentice being led astray _more_.

(He doesn’t think anymore, _I am the master now. I could_ make _him leave_.)

+

Thirteen hours later, Savage’s twi’lek acquaintance is still shouting about the Galactic Food and Drug Administration’s recent regulations on accarrgm. “Pure discrimination, is what it is!” she complains. “They wanna ban it just because some _humans_ had a sip too much and died of alcohol poisoning? Let’s give a geonosian a bottle of Corellian ale and see what happens, but noooo. Course not. Kriffin’ humans. Do you know how many credits I’ve lost because I’ve had to say, no, sorry, we’re out of stock? Kashyyyk should sue! Not that it would help any because the karking courts are stacked against us, but...”

Savage vociferously agrees. Maul rolls his eyes—his brother may or may not have been even _capable_ of understanding what she’s talking about, about fifteen shot glasses ago.

“They think they’re the bosses—they think they own us, fuckin’ slavers. Any luck and they’ll get what’s coming to them, soon...”

The only reason Maul is even listening with half an ear is because there is nothing else worth hearing in the bar.

His eyes are blinking sleepily at the vidscreen in the corner, which is showing reruns of Onderon’s last swoop bike race season with the sound turned off. He’s just felt his way into the rhythm of the race and predicted that in one or two seconds, current champion Nkh will crash her bike into the railings—maybe he should find someone to bet with—when the screen changes into a red-white swirling mass of dots. The galaxy turning, revolving around Coruscant.

It’s the early morning broadcast of Realtime News.

As soon as Maul’s identified the topic of the first bulletin, he snarls at his companions, “Shut up.” This is _important_.

There is a blockade-breaking cruiser being pulverized on the screen.

Then, it’s showing a painted girl that’s familiar from a recent mission dossier, with heavy robes and heavier words. The Nubian child queen, telling the galaxy—or those parts of it that have no excitement in their lives and are reduced to sitting in a bar and watching holonet newscasts—telling everybody of her planet’s invasion and begging for help.

Next—Maul recalls his Master’s remarks on journalists’ love for balance and fairness, and his smile—next there is Viceroy Nute Gunray of the Trade Federation, condemning Naboo’s decisions in the trade dispute and justifying his actions as self-defense. Beside him, there is an empty spot: He still hasn’t found a replacement for Deputy Hath Monchar, the coward who’d have sold evidence of the plot to the next available bidder and destroyed everything if Maul hadn’t stopped him.

It has begun.

There is no need for a successor, for another link in Bane’s lineage, now.

The first domino stone in Sidious’ plan to assume control of the galaxy has fallen—the plot that required the surrender of Maul’s childhood and that saw him beaten and delirious with vomit, the altar upon which he’d happily butchered his brother’s body and affection—and here he is on this momentous occasion, being ranted at by a human-hating alien separatist, in this dinghy bar full of down-on their-luck outcasts hoping to make a quick buck on a remote mining colony.

Here, in this sticky uncomfortable seat, nursing a glass of virgin blumfruit daiquiri stuffed so full with ice cubes it makes his teeth burn, sits the former Darth Maul.

The thousand-year-old plot of the Sith has started to unfurl, and he is parsecs away.

_He was never necessary, after all._

“Hey, Maul,” Socvumo’s throaty voice cuts into his dejection, an inch from his right ear. “I think your bro’s had a little too much now.”

She’s right, and just in time. Maul manages to grab Savage by the horns before his head slides fully off the table.

“You got a safe place for him to sleep it off?”

Maul nods at her, and tries to lay the enormous floppy form of his inebriated brother across his shoulders. Savage’s head hits the table with a dull thud when he stands up. Quickly, he touches the skull to check whether anything’s broken off, and tries again. It’s no use, though: Maul attempts to walk to the door, but he can barely stand with the weight on his back.

He’ll have to _drag_ his brother back to the Sheathipede—drag him _home_.

This is his life now.

+

_(“Maul,” Savage had whispered a lifetime ago._ Maul _. A good, strong name. A blessing to scare away the ghosts. A talisman and prayer to keep the baby clothed in the warm mantle of darkness—a name to keep him hidden from beasts and despair and maybe, hopefully,_ please _, also from the pale grasping fingers that haunt every nightbrother’s dream: A name to keep his brother safe and angry and free._

_Savage had said it again—_ and will forever until it wears out his vocal chords, “Maul,” his lips wrapping around the syllable with love and awe.

_He’d carefully supported the baby’s head and delighted in the way the little horn-nubs pressed against his skin. The child had gnawed on his fingertips with his tiny toothless jaws, and Savage had known there would be never anything more important in his life._

_There would be no pain he wouldn’t suffer to keep his brother by his side.)_

**Author's Note:**

> Me, incredibly naive and two weeks ago: Let me just write a short coda to reassure myself they'll be alright. Whoops. Better post it now before I decide it's complete garbage
> 
> Darth Maul's face being covered with Sith tattoos was my favourite ancient fan theory that was destroyed by the character design decisions of Clone Wars. It would have fit with Sidious way of behaving, messing with his apprentices' bodies, and undermining any chance they could have to act and triumph the way he does, because he has made them unmistakably _other_. Oh well. I love Savage, so I'm not complaining too much.
> 
> The title's from a song by the Mountain Goats & Kaki King.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!!


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